Obama’s Presidential (Mixed) Race: Framing and Ideological Analysis of Blogs and News

Posted in Barack Obama, Communications/Media Studies, Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-09-26 21:26Z by Steven

Obama’s Presidential (Mixed) Race: Framing and Ideological Analysis of Blogs and News

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
July 2011
217 pages

Iliana P. Rucker

DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States brought a heightened awareness to the role of race and produced speculation about the idealized notion of the achievement of a post-racial United States.

This dissertation examined mediated conversations on mixed race identity in response to some of the significant events in the Obama campaign and the first months of the Obama presidency. Specifically, this study examined the ways that newspapers and blogs construct discourses about race, mixed race, and racism. Further, I explored the biological, legal, and social implications as they relate to current constructions of mixed race identity. This dissertation centered the data collection around four pivotal discourses in the Obama era: (1) Obama’s announcement of his presidential candidacy; (2) Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech; (3) Obama’s election to the presidency; and (4) the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Gates. The parameters of these pivotal discourses allowed me to focus on what bloggers say about the events and how the newspapers reported them. Ideological criticism and framing analysis guided my study on racial identifications and negotiations related to Obama from three newspapers: New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times; as well as four blogs: Mixed Roots, Beige-World, Light-skinned-ed Girl, and Twisted Curlz.

Three dominant frames emerged from the news coverage on the four discursive moments: race, dialogue, and history. I define the race frame as stories about the issues concerning race and racism; the dialogue frame as stories about a conversation, specifically at the national level; and the historical frame as stories about historic events. Three frames also emerged from the framing analysis of the blog posts: awareness, personalization, and racism. The awareness frame consists of postings about news and celebrity in mixed race community; the personalization frame as personal postings; and the racism frame as postings relating to issues concerning racism.

Ideological criticism facilitated the analysis of the news articles and blogs and allowed me to uncover several ideologies about race and mixed race emerge from these discursive constructions. The newspapers perpetuated the invisibility of Whiteness, the Black and White binary, hybrid heroism, and the erasure of racism ideologies. The preference for Obama as President, the salience of mixed race matters, and promotion of anti-racist work are ideologies in the blogs. While the blogs and news articles are different in format, style and purpose, taken together they give a look at the ongoing conversation that impacts discourses on race, racism, and mixed race. The interpretation of the findings explains how the media I examined reveal the social construction of race, the rhetoric of race, and agenda setting in each of the discursive moments in order to discuss current conceptualizations of race in the United States. In addition to an in-depth interpretation of framing and ideological analyses findings, the theoretical and methodological contributions are discussed.

Table of Contents

  • CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
    • Personal Perspective
      • Researcher Perspective
      • Rationale
      • Data Collection and Analysis
        • News Media
        • Weblogs
      • Obama, Race, and Identity
        • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
      • Assumptions
      • Research Questions
    • Key Concepts
      • Mixed Race Identity
      • Post-Racial United States
      • Media Conversations
    • Overview
  • CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
    • Racial Identity
    • Biological Assumptions
      • One-drop rule
    • Legal Assumptions
      • Social Implications
    • Socially Constructing Race
      • Media Framing
      • Rhetorical and Ideological Framing
      • Rhetoric of Race
      • Terministic screens
        • Mixed Race and Media Representations
  • CHAPTER 3: METHODS
    • Discursive Moments
    • Data Collection
    • Research Questions
    • Methods
      • Ideological analysis
      • Locating myself in the research
  • CHAPTER 4: FRAMING ANALYSIS
    • Framing Analysis
      • Defining Frames
    • Framing Analysis of Newspapers
      • Race Frame
        • Racialized Obama script
        • Race is biological
        • Progressing past racism script
      • Dialogue Frame
        • National script
        • Debate script
      • History Frame
        • From the past script
        • Witnessing history script
    • Framing Analysis of Blog Posts
      • Awareness Frame
        • Mixed Race News script
        • Celebrity script
        • Questions script
      • Personalization Frame
        • Positionality
        • 2008 election experience
      • Racism Frame
        • Racial divide
        • Racial hatred
        • Challenging stereotyping and racial profiling script
  • CHAPTER 5: IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
    • Defining Ideology
    • Ideological Analysis of News Discourse
      • Invisibility of Whiteness
      • Black and White Binary
      • Hybrid Heroism
      • Erasing Racism
    • Ideological Analysis of Blog Discourse
      • Obama for President
        • Defending Barack Obama
        • Acceptance
        • Obama is mixed
      • Anti-Racist Work
  • CHAPTER 6: INTERPRETATION
    • Social Construction of Race
      • Rhetoric of race
    • Agenda Setting
    • Four Pivotal Moments in Discourses on Mixed Race
    • Conclusion
  • CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION
    • Findings
      • RQ1: How do pivotal discourses during Obama’s campaign and early presidency stimulate conversations about race, mixed race identity, racism?
        • RQ1a: How do newspapers frame race and mixed race identity?
        • RQ1b: How do blogs frame race, mixed race, and racism?
      • RQ2: What ideologies about race, racism, and mixed race emerge from newspapers and blogs?
        • Newspapers
        • Blogs
      • RQ3: How do media discourses contribute to constructions of race?
      • RQ4: In what ways do the constructions suggest the possibility of a post-racial United States?
      • RQ5: How do newspapers and blogs set agendas that reinforce and oppose each other?
    • Contributions
      • Contributions to theory
      • Contributions to method
    • Future Research
    • Final Thoughts
    • References

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Being Raced, Acting Racially: Multiracial Tribal College Students’ Representations of Their Racial Identity Choices

Posted in Campus Life, Dissertations, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Social Science, United States on 2011-08-17 01:35Z by Steven

Being Raced, Acting Racially: Multiracial Tribal College Students’ Representations of Their Racial Identity Choices

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
September 2010
208 pages

Michelle Rene Montgomery

DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies

In recent years, many studies have clearly documented that mixed-race people are currently engaged in the process of self validation (DaCosta. 2007; Dalmage, 2003; McQueen, 2002; Root, 1996 & 2001; Spencer, J, M., 1997; Spencer, R., 2006a; Thorton, 1992). There is not a lot of empirical research that examines how schools influence the racial identity of multiracial students, in particular mixed-race students that identify as Native American. Even more troubling is the lack of literature on experiences of mixed-race students using racial identity choice as a social and political tool through race discourse and actions. The aim of this qualitative case study was to look at the relationship between the racial agency of multiracial students and the larger white supremacist social structure. The research questions addressed in this study are as follows: (1) How do the formal and informal schooling contexts shape the identity choices of multiracial students? (2) How do the identity choices of multiracial students conform to an/or resist the racialized social system of the United States?

This study was conducted at a tribal college in New Mexico with selected mixed-race participants who identified as Native American, or acknowledged Native American ancestry. At the time of data collection, the school enrollment was 513 students, representing 83 federally recognized tribes and 22 state recognized tribes. The presence of a multi-racial body of students created a unique contributing factor of multiracial participants for a broader understanding of mixed-race experiences in cultural and traditional learning environments. The study was conducted using qualitative case study methodology of mixed-race students interviewed in the last weeks of the fall semester (pre-interview) and once during the last few weeks of the spring semester (post interviews). Mixed-race students were asked to discuss nine group sessions during the spring semester their lived experiences that influenced their identity choices. The sample for this study represented mixed-race participants from various tribal communities. In an eight-month time period of the study, nine participants were interviewed and participated in-group sessions. Of the nine total in sample, two were male, seven were female; three were Native American/white, two were black/white/Native American, three were Hispanic/white/Native American, and one were Hispanic/Native American.

From my analysis of the nine participants’ mixed-race experience, three overarching themes emerged: (a) racial(ized) self-perceptions, (b) peer interactions and influences, and (c) impact on academic experiences. Of the nine participants, how a students’ race was asserted, assigned, and reassigned appears to be determined by being mixed-race with black versus white or non-black. According to the participants, this particular tribal college did not provide a supportive or welcoming environment. As a result, students were highly stratified based on experiences tied to their phenotype and racial mixture; the more “black” they appeared, the more alienated they were. In the classroom, there was often a divide between black/Native mixed-race students versus white/Native mixed-race students, similar to the differences between monoracial white and black student experiences. As a result of dissimilar experiences based on mixedness, there were group association conflicts during their schooling experiences that included feeling vicitimized when their whiteness did not prevail as an asset or being alienated due to blackness. The study also found a clear distinction between the mixed-race black experience versus the mixed-race with white experience based on phenotypic features. Overall, mixed-race with black schooling experiences indicated situations of racial conflict. The findings of this study have policy implications for tribal colleges and other institutions to develop programs and services to help mixed-race students identify and bond with their learning environments.

Table of Contents

  • CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
    • Introduction
    • Statement of the Problem
    • Purpose of the Study
    • Significance of the Study
    • Research Questions
    • Definition of Key Terms
    • Overview of Methodology
    • Limitations of the Study
  • CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
    • Introduction
      • The Politics of Multiracialism
      • Empirical Research On The Identity Politics of Multiracial Students40
  • CHAPTER 3 METHODS
    • Focus of the Research
    • Research Design
    • Research Participants
    • Setting
    • Portrait of Participants
    • Data Collection
    • Data Analysis
    • Ethics
    • Validity
    • Trustworthiness
  • CHAPTER 4 ANALYSIS OF MIXED-RACE EXPERIENCES
    • Theme One: Racial(ized) Self-Perceptions
      • Identity Politics of Blood Quantum
        • Black/Native American Experience
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Summary
      • Self-Perceptions of Race Being Asserted, Negotiated and Redefined
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
        • Black/Native American Experience
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
          • Black/Native American Experience
          • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Disadvantages: Mixed-race Identity Choice
        • Black/Native American Experience
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Advantages: Mixed-race Identity Choice
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Summary
    • Theme Two: Peer Interactions and Influences
      • Perceivable Differences
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
        • Black/Native American Experience
      • Summary
      • Surviving the Losses
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
        • Black/Native American Experience
      • Summary
    • Theme Three: The Impact on Academic Experiences
      • The Role of Tribal Colleges
      • Schooling Experiences
        • Black/Native American Experience
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Summary
  • CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
    • Discussion
      • Major Findings
        • Research Question #1
        • Research Question #2
      • Summary
      • Recommendations
        • Administrators
        • Faculty and Staff
        • Future Research
        • Conclusion
  • APPENDICES
  • APPENDIX A CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN RESEARCH
  • APPENDIX B PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRE
  • APPENDIX C FIRST PARTICIPANT INTERVIEW
  • APPENDIX D SECOND PARTICIPANT INTERVIEW
  • REFERENCES

Chapter 1: Introduction

Introduction

Dark brown skin with wavy hair, I am accustomed to being asked, “What are you?” Often I am mistaken for being reserved despite my easy, sincere grin. My facial expression perhaps does not show what I have learned in my life: reluctant people endure, passionate people live. Whether it is the glint of happiness in my eyes or what I call “using laughter to heal your soul,” my past experience as a mixed-race person has been significantly different from my current outlook on life. I am at ease with my lived experiences, very willing to share and even encouraging others to probe more into my racialized experience. Like many mixed-race people, I experienced an epiphany: disowning a need to belong and disengaging from the structure of race has given me the confidence to critique race discourse.

I identify as Native American with mixed-race heritage. I am mixed-race black/white, Native American, and mixed-race Korean/Mongolian. My father is mixedrace black/white and Native American, and my mother is mixed-race Korean/Mongolian. We are enrolled members of the Haliwa Saponi Tribe. When I was growing up, my father taught me that I am a multiracial person. So, I can personally relate to the idea that monoraciality does not fit my multiracial identity or those of other multiracials in our socalled “melting pot” society.

However, countless numbers of times I have been raced in ways that have forced me to choose a group association. My own experiences illustrate how racial designation and group association plays itself out in society, including in classroom learning environments. My siblings and I grew up in a predominantly mixed-race Native American community in northeastern North Carolina that included black, Native American, and white ancestry. I attended a rural high school that contained mixed-race black/Native American, mixed-raced white/Native American, monoracial blacks, and monoracial white students. It was not unusual for mixed-race black/Native American and monoracial blacks to create close group associations, which were exhibited through social interactions that occurred when sitting together in the cafeteria, classrooms, or in designated lounging areas around campus. However, mixed-race white/Native American students, especially those who seemed phenotypically white, did not want to be associated with monoracial black students. Most mixed-race white/Native American students created group associations with monoracial white students. As a brown complexioned multiracial person in this racially polarized environment, I was placed in a situation where I had to choose a group association to keep mixed-race black/Native American and monoracial black students from viewing me as acting white. On the other hand, the mixed-raced white/Native Americans and monoracial whites viewed my actions as acting black.

Because of my Korean and Mongolian ancestry, I was not perceived phenotypically as a true member of the black or Native American groups. My Koreanness caused friction between me and the monoracial black and mixed-race black/Native American groups with which I most commonly associated because it gave me an inroad to the white/r groups that they did not have. Because I did not acknowledge and challenge my advantage, I allowed myself to be used as an agent of racism. This happened in a number of ways. For instance, monoracial white and mixed-race Native American groups asked me to sit with them in the cafeteria, but they did not invite monoracial blacks and mixed-race black/Native Americans. And I accepted their invitation. As a consequence, the group with which I most associated viewed me as a race traitor, as a racial fraud. And I felt like one, too. I am ashamed that I actively participated in the denigration of blacks, which is the most denigrated part of my own ancestry. A multiracial person with black ancestry who accepts not being identified as black in an effort to subvert white privilege (i.e., resisting racial categorization as a way of challenging the notion of race) can actually be reinforcing it, as was the case for me. The problem is how the context and meaning of being a race traitor or committing racial fraud arises out of and is bounded by the social and political descriptions of race. Both social and political constructs are then used as a justification for policing the accuracy of racial identification or political alliance. In most instances, being cast as a race traitor, or as an alleged racial fraud, is a constitutive feature of the dynamics of the informal school setting, and is further developed in the formal schooling setting Since racial identity is a social and political construct, it requires meaning in the context of a particular set of social relationships. In a tribal college setting, the identity politics of blood quantum often influences the multiracial experience of students (i.e., learning environment…

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Negotiating Honor: Women and Slavery in Caracas, 1750-1854

Posted in Anthropology, Caribbean/Latin America, Dissertations, Family/Parenting, History, Media Archive, Slavery, Social Science, Women on 2011-07-16 04:44Z by Steven

Negotiating Honor: Women and Slavery in Caracas, 1750-1854

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
May 2011
214 pages

Sue E. Taylor

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

This study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

Each group of women had a concept of what honor meant for them and each sought to preserve honor by demanding fair and humane treatment, to be treated with respect and dignity, and to protect their reputations. They also expected those people who had control over them to behave with honor. Sometimes honor, as seen in the cases and as demanded by slave and free black women, corresponded to traditional concepts of honor as birthright as defined by elite members of society and other times not. In other examples, women of color used honor along the lines of Stewart’s concept of honor as the entitlement of treatment as a worthwhile person. By looking beyond honor as birthright, the women in my study also invoked honor in their expectation that they be treated with dignity and respect and be able to preserve their reputations in society and with their peers. Slave owners, on the other hand, were sensitive to accusations of being overly harsh in their treatment of their human possessions. Their good reputation required both paternalism and firm control. Slave litigants tested the boundaries of appropriate coercion and restraint in their suits against abusive or unreasonable slave owners. They also showed a sophisticated understanding of legal codes and institutions.

Table of Contents

  • List of Tables
  • Introduction
    • Honor, women, and slavery
    • Historiography
    • Literature on gender and slave women
    • Literature on Honor
    • Honor in Latin America
    • Methodology and Sources
    • Organization of Chapters
  • Part I: Redefining Honor
    • Chapter 2: Mistreatment as an indicator of dishonor
      • Protecting honor through the court
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter 3: Redefining Sexual Honor: Broken Promises and Respectable Work
      • Broken Promises
      • Respectable Work and Honor
      • Conclusion
  • Part II: The slave family
    • Chapter 4: Slave and free black families as seen through Church documentation
      • The Parish of San Pablo
      • Marriage
      • Baptisms
      • Matriculas
    • Chapter 5: Preserving the Family
      • Children and Childhood
      • Enslaved Children: Achieving Freedom
      • The death of an owner
      • Marriage and Honor
      • Families and use of the law
  • Part III: Slavery, freedom, and emancipation in the post-independence Liberal State
    • Chapter 6: Slavery and Independence
      • Venezuela moves toward revolution
      • The Junta de Secuestros
      • Revolution, slaves, and free blacks
      • Slavery in the republic of Venezuela
      • Freedom in the post-independence state
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter 7: Conclusion
  • Bibliography

List of Tables

  • Table 1: Slave and Free Black Marriages, San Pablo Parish
  • Table 2: Slave Marriages
  • Table 3: Free Black and slave/manumiso baptisms by year
  • Table 4: Slave and Manumiso Baptisms
  • Table 5: Slave and manumiso baptisms 1752-1852 by gender and status
  • Table 6: Godparents
  • Table 7: Heads of Household by race & marital status
  • Table 8: Single heads of household
  • Table 9: Slave Ownership
  • Table 10: Slave Distribution
  • Table 11: Slave Statistics
  • Table 12: Overview of San Pablo Parish

Chapter 1: Introduction

Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

My study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. This study aids in our understanding of gender and power relations within late colonial Venezuela and beyond, and will contribute to our knowledge of slavery in Latin America more broadly. The intersection of power, gender, race, and sexuality is especially important to this study. By power, I mean the socially sanctioned coercion of one category of person over another that permitted domination of masters over slaves, men over women, etc. Gender refers to socially constructed assumptions regarding behaviors, values, and societal roles assigned to men and women; it serves as a lens through which we can study the experiences and actions of historical actors. How power was mediated between masters and slaves and men and women, including female slave owners is a central concern of this study…

…Winthrop Wright’s monograph on race and class in Venezuela studies the changes in racial attitudes from the colonial period through the first half of the twentieth-century. Wright argues that the cash crop economy and resultant labor arrangements determined the nature of Venezuela’s colonial two-tiered society. The nature of colonial society in Venezuela—relatively under-populated, rural, at the fringe of the empire, with a majority of the population of African descent – mandated racial mixing, according to Wright. However, because miscegenation did not break down the barriers between the elite and the lower classes, race became a “systemic factor in the division of colonial society into distinct castes.” This colonial order persisted until black and mixed race troops were included in the independence movement.

A useful gender study that transcends race and class boundaries is Verena Stolcke’s (Martinez-Alier) 1974 monograph, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. She uses marriage, specifically deviations from the norm, as a lens to assess nineteenth-century Cuban society. Stolcke examines cases of parents opposed to their child’s marriage, cases of elopement, and instances of interracial marriage, arguing that these deviations not only highlight conflicts within the system, but more importantly, make the norms even more apparent. This book deals specifically with interracial marriage within a slave-owning society. The fact that a large portion of the Cuban population were slaves, ex-slaves, or descendants of slaves is crucial to her argument. Her work raises important issues to colonial Cuban society and gender that are applicable to my case.

Finally, my study examines free African and mixed-race women living during the era of slavery to discover how their lives, occupations, opportunities, religious practices, and family relationships may have differed from those of their enslaved counterparts. Because slavery continued to expand in Venezuela through the end of the eighteenth century, the free population of color was sizeable, numbering nearly 200,000 free people of color, or forty-six percent of the population, by the end of the century…

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Mutants, mudbloods, and futureheroes: Mixed race identity in contemporary narrative

Posted in Arts, Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-03-25 03:44Z by Steven

Mutants, mudbloods, and futureheroes: Mixed race identity in contemporary narrative

The University of New Mexico
May 2008
327 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3318087
ISBN: 9780549676652

Felecia Rose Caton-Garcia

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is experiencing the expansion of a self-identified biracial, multiracial, and mixed race citizenry. This work examines the dominant tropes operative in the study of mixed race narrative cultural production, specifically film, fiction, and life-writing, in order to historicize and contextualize contemporary cultural production. In particular, this dissertation examines contemporary narratives with regard to the “tragic mulatto” trope in US culture throughout the 19th and 20th century and articulates the ways in which the abundance of contemporary work on mixed race both sustains and resists old archetypes and narratives. To this end, a survey of life-writing, fiction, and speculative film and fiction of the past fifteen years is conducted to determine new narrative tropes governing mixed race identity, particularly those identities that deviate from the historical black/white binary of biracial identity.

While some texts remain grounded in the idea of the mixed race person as deficient or problematic with regards to race and gender identity development, the dissertation identifies a general turn away from the “tragic mulatto” archetype, and a turn toward the mixed race identity as a holistic hybrid identity that is more than the sum of its parts. The study reveals that contemporary renderings of mixed race identity have become transnational, dynamic, unsettling, and synergistic. Further, the emergent tropes in mixed race narratives suggest hybridity as the inevitable future of humanity and some contemporary texts suggest that this hybridity is the mechanism through which humanity will progress toward racial equity and substantive democratic principles. These new narratives are explicated, analyzed, and critiqued with regard to their function in contemporary United States culture and politics.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One—Beguiling and Mysterious: Multiracialism Comes of Age
    • The Mulatto Millennium
    • A Note on Terms
    • Interracial Intimacy and Miscegenation in U.S. History and Law
    • Mixed Race in the Social Sciences
    • The Tragic Mulatto y Mas: the Need for a Hybrid Criticism
  • Chapter Two—Like Mother Like Daughter?: The Poetics of Mixed Race Autobiography
    • “Likeness” and Culture
    • A Matter of Perspective: The Autobiographical Impulse
    • Hands Across the Ouija Board: The Process of Writing Autobiography
    • Who Are Your People?: Racial Identity and Family
    • “Don’t ask so many questions”: The Color of Family
    • “I find family there”: Choosing Blackness in Bulletproof Diva
    • Beyond Family: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Racial Formation
    • Blood and Water
  • Chapter Three—Graceful Monsters: Mixed Race, Desire, Love, and Family in Contemporary Fiction
    • The Borders of the Tragic Mulatto
    • Hybrid Arts: The Use of Aesthetics to Narrate Mixed Race Identity
    • The Man in the Mirror: Double-Consciousness, Alternative Realities, and Mixed Race in Diaz, Alexie, Tenorio, and Davies
  • Chapter Four—Vin Ordinaire: Hollywood Film and the Mixed Race Futurehero
    • Geek Nation: The Rise of Science Fiction in Hollywood Film
    • Beautiful Mutants: Transgressive Bodies and Futuresexuals
    • Saving Humanity, Sacrificing Self: Tragedy and Triumph for the New Mulatto
  • Chapter Five—Mudbloods, Mutants, and Mulattos: New Speculative Fiction
    • Multiplicities: Histories, Futures, Realities, Races, Genders
    • Technologies of Hybridity: William Gibson and China Mieville
    • Half-Blood Magic: Harry Potter’s Muddy Dilemma
  • Conclusion—Synergy and Symbiosis: What’s at Stake in the Stories We Tell
    • References Cited

Read or purchase the dissertation here.

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